12 minute read
tsunami survivors
When Andy Whittaker rowed ashore February 26 to clear out of Chile's remote Robinson Crusoe Island, the plan was for him and his wife, Rhian Salmon, to set sail for Easter Island that
afternoon. But something in his gut told him to stay another day. It was, after all, a Friday, and as the centuries-old superstition dictates, sailors should never leave port on a Friday. There was something more than that, though; something intuitive that urged him to linger another day. Later, when he told Rhian of his decision, she was delighted, as the extra day would give them time to thoroughly secure everything on deck and get a bit more rest. They were, in fact, still a bit worn out after their rough 550-mile crossing from Puerto Montt, on the Chilean mainland — which was the fi rst blue-water crossing either of them had ever made. Typically, most sailors break into offshore voyaging gradually after years of instruction and practice in sheltered inshore waters. However, this feisty British couple is anything but typical. They met and fell in love while working in Antarctica. Andy, 36, is an ex-Royal Marine who often earns his pay suspended from industrial structures hundreds of feet in the air, when he's not mountaineering in places like Patagonia and Antarctica. Rhian, 35, holds a PhD in atmospheric chemistry, which led her to spend four seasons with the British Antarctic Survey. After somehow getting the sailing bug, they bought the stout 37-ft sloop Zephyrus in Ushuaia — Argentina's southern-
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Happier times: Rhian and Andy fell in love while in Antarctica and decided to explore the world under sail.
most city — and spent the better part of a year refi tting her before setting out for New Zealand late last January.
During that fateful Friday night, while Andy slept soundly, Rhian's intuitive powers kicked in, as she sensed something odd. The heavy ferrocement hull seemed to be rocking with a peculiar motion. Uncommon gurgling noises coming from the head and sinks caused her to get up and shut off several throughhull fi ttings. Then around 4 a.m. Andy woke up suddenly: "'What the heck is that'? I thought. I heard the sound of water rushing by the hull, as if we were sailing — fast." Outside, it was a pitch-black night. He shined a light around, but all he could see was water streaming past the hull. "It was as if we were doing 20+ knots."
Zephyrus was moored in the southeast corner of Cumberland Bay, lying in 75 feet of water on a huge mooring that had been set by the Chilean Armada (Navy). Having dived on it himself, Andy knew its construction — a 4-ton concrete slab augmented by four 50-lb fi shing anchors secured to its corners — and he was confi dent that it was secure. At the head of the bay lay the waterside town of San Juan Bautista. There were no other cruising boats on the bay that night, only unoccupied fi shing boats. "Initially I had no idea what was going on," recalls Andy. "For the life of me I couldn't work out what was happening." Then he and Rhian heard a thunderous rumble ashore. "It sounded like thousands of tons of earth being poured out of a giant dump truck all at once," explains Andy. Both he and Rhian assumed it must have been a massive landslide. But it was, of course, the roar of an immense wall of water crashing against the shoreline; a tsunami estimated to have been 15 feet high which traveled to the island at roughly 500 mph, generated by the now-famous 8.8 earthquake that had rocked the Chilean mainland less than an hour earlier. The epicenter was nearly due east of this tiny island and its three smaller neighbors within the Juan Fernandez archipelago. It is darkly ironic that Andy had actually heard that exact crashing sound before, but in the confusion of that dark, eerie night, he didn't make the connection. Amazingly, he'd been in Thailand on December 26, 2004, when a catastrophic tsunami struck, but he was just far enough inland to avoid the fate of so many others. More than 8,000 Thais and vacationers perished. On Robinson Crusoe, as in Thailand, there had been no warning.
The character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, after whom this normally tranquil island is named, was modeled after Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned here from 1704 to 1708.
ALL PHOTOS ZEPHYRUS
"Shortly after the crash," Andy recalls, "we heard people screaming, calling out for their loved ones." Zephyrus lay about 50 yards from the nearest land, and perhaps 150 yards from the heart of the village. As the churning water rushed out of the bay in the fi rst of a series of powerful surges, it brought with it a chaotic jumble of debris: whole trees, splintered lumber, fi shing gear, small boats and all sorts of household items. "Suddenly, among trees and debris, a
young lad appeared out of the darkness," Andy remembers. "I shouted to him in Spanish to swim to the boat. Moments later the surge slammed him into the side of the hull, and I was able to pull him aboard." He was a 14-year-old boy named Pablo who was shivering, bleeding from numerous cuts and scrapes, and covered in oil. Rhian tried to warm and console him as he screamed in terror, "Mama! Papa!" She took him below to put him in bed and instinctively started to put on a kettle of water but immediately changed her San Juan Bautista mind, as Zephyrus was surrounded by fumes of Cumberland Bay gas and oil that lay on the surface. "A minute later another boy came through the water," Andy recalls. "'Swim! Swim!' I screamed." He was a strong 17-year-old, and was able to reach the
Robinson Crusoe Island
nautical miles 0 1 2 Valparaiso lies 360nm due east hull, where Andy pulled him up out of the churning bay. About this time Rhian asked, "Where is the Armada? Why is there no rescue service?" Unbeknowst to her and
Andy, the entire naval station had been completely wiped out, along with about 60 homes, numerous businesses and government buildings, the sports center and the island's only school. On the VHF they heard no offi cial communications, only random fi shermen scrambling to fi nd boats so they could search for survivors. A while later, they could make out a huge Chilean Armada ship coming toward them in the darkness. "The Armada!" Rhian shouted with excited relief. But as it lunged closer on a collision course with Zephyrus, they realized that the vessel was unmanned. When the tsunami struck, the ship had broken loose from its mooring and was sent adrift with its enormous mooring fl oat still attached. "Somehow the boys and
Left and far left: When these shots were taken, days before the disaster, Cumberland Bay was totally placid. Above: Tsunami carnage.
I were able to fend it off with oars from our rowing dinghy," Andy explains. More surges followed carrying all sorts of rubble — including whole houses. One of them collided with Zephyrus: "It scraped along the side of the boat ripping paint off and putting gouges all along one side of the hull," says Andy. As if that wasn't frightening enough, the
wood-frame building somehow got hung up on the forestay where a second house soon piled up against it. "I looked at the forestay bending like a bow," says Andy, "then at our mooring lines thinking 'Any second now something's going to pop.' But amazingly they all held." The couple later calculated that the huge mooring
they were on had actually moved about 50 feet. They were convinced that the force of those houses must have done it. The runaway buildings eventually broke free, but the drama was about to get even more intense. Andy explains, "There was another surge. A house was being washed out and we could hear screams from inside it." To their horror, the shell-shocked couple saw a father, mother and two small children looking out through an upstairs window." It turned out that the father was a Navy diver who'd only recently been teaching his kids how to dive. When the tsunami hit, dislodging the house from its foundation, 7-year-old Francisca was asleep on the lower fl oor, which quickly flooded. Her father commanded her to dive into the water as he'd taught her, and swim up the staircase to safety. Once she'd done that he helped her and her 5-year-old brother into wetsuits. As the house rushed by, Rhian, Andy, and the two stranded teenage boys screamed to the family to jump in and swim. On the third try, the father finally grabbed a rescue line. Andy and Rhian had just gotten little Francisca safely aboard when a surge tore the mother and her son from the line. The father, Alex, let go too, not about to let his family drift away without him, and the three of them disappeared into the night. Naturally, little Francisca was horrifi ed, as it seemed obvious that she would never see her family again. Rhian did her best to console and warm her below decks. Adding to the surreal nature of that long night, Andy remembers that the roar of the ocean and the screams of desperate people ashore were punctuated regularly by the sound of propane bottles "capping off" as they broke loose from the fl oating houses that they had fueled.
With gasoline, diesel and oil already glazing the sea surface it was a very unsettling sound. About two long hours later, still before dawn, a fi shing boat pulled up alongside Zephyrus. Its helmsman, who was completely naked and freezing cold, turned out to be young Pablo's uncle. Also aboard were Francisca's lost family members, who scampered aboard Zephyrus for a tearful reunion with their elated daughter. "Dear God, thank you," Rhian remembers thinking. She gave dry clothes to the helmsman, and as soon as he warmed up a bit, he took off with the two teenage boys to search for more survivors. "Alex was a very practical, clearthinking guy," Andy recalls. "He started to cut away all the shit around the boat in case we needed to go quickly, while I started laying out sails. We both fi gured we'd have fouled the prop within seconds, as there was so much fi shing line all around." At some point they snagged a half-submerged Zodiac that was fl oating by and secured it, thinking it might come in handy later.
"Gradually, we started piecing together what had happened," Rhian wrote later. "This was no landslide. It was a
wave, a huge wave. As dawn approached, we started to digest the damage. The whole town front had been wiped out. Gone." From her prespective it appeared that the tsunami had driven roughly 80 yards inshore, and surged at least sixty feet up the steep hill behind the town with its initial thrust. Having made a number of new friends during their one-week stay at this normally tranquil island, both Rhian and Andy initially assumed they would stick around and see what they could do to help. But a half hour after sunrise the Armada called via VHF to relay a warning from the mainland that another wave was coming. The whole town was being evacuated and Zephyrus, they said, needed to leave the bay immediately. Andy decided the best idea would be to put Alex and his family ashore in the next bay, away from the bulk of the fl oating debris. "We cut all the rubble away, started the engine and gunned it
Rhian is an accomplished scientist with a PhD. But she's been challenged to learn many new things in her new voyaging lifestyle.
Rhian said the trip to Robinson Crusoe — her fi rst major sail — was the hardest thing she'd ever done. But the landfall was glorious.
out of the bay," says Andy. Amazingly, they got clear without fouling the prop. In the neighboring bay they motored in as close as they dared, and the traumatized family made it safely ashore in the wayward Zodiac. The Armada had instructed Andy and Rhian to go 10 miles offshore, or into water that was 500 feet deep. By the time they reached that distance they'd seen three relief planes approaching the island and had heard that a Navy ship was en route. The wind angle was ideal for their next leg to Easter Island, a 1,600-mile crossing. But they both felt deeply confl icted."I desperately wanted to go back. So did Andy," Rhian wrote later. "Our hearts said return; our heads said continue."
Fortunately, that second wave never materialized, but we imagine the rebuilding effort is still ongoing nevertheless. Sixteen of Crusoe's population of 600 lost their lives on that horrible night. Luckily, Andy and Rhian weren't among them. Of course, had they been willing to set sail on a Friday, they would have steered clear of the disaster entirely. But by yielding to that age-old superstition — and a curious gut feeling — they were able to save several young lives. And although those survivors and their rescuers may never meet again, we're certain they'll never forget each other or the ordeal they shared on that long, dark night.
RHIAN SALMON
Upon arrival, Andy rigged the quarantine fl ag. Little did he know, those calm bay waters would turn into a raging cauldron.
— latitude/andy
Editor's note — We heard part of this amazing tale in February, but it wasn't until we caught up to Rhian and Andy in Tonga last month that we got their full report.
A footnote to this story holds a worthwhile lesson: A friend of Rhian living in Shanghai happened to read a tsunami report relayed from Hawaii — which Chilean authorities apparently ignored. He phoned Rhian's brother in New York, who immediately called her satphone. Unfortunately it was turned off. If it had been active, they would have had 20 minutes' warning and might have been able to alert authorities ashore. Tsunami warnings were issued in 53 countries. Damage occurred as far away as Japan and New Zealand.
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